Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Movie Morning and Making Progress Is What Matters

This morning started with my run. 20 minutes of speed on the treadmill today. It was supposed to be cold but when I walked outside I thought it didn't feel too bad, and then when I walked back out after the workout, it was cold. And then when we walked J to the bus it was colder. I'm not ready for this! Luckily we always have hot chocolate stocked up because hot chocolate is one of the only ways I make it through winter. It's only fall, but it felt a little like winter this morning and I think it's going to end up feeling that cold for the next few days.

Because it was a rainy, cold morning, we had a movie morning before taking M to school.

This is currently V's favorite activity. He is constantly pulling all the movies out. At first, we thought maybe he was thinking the movies were books, but I'm pretty sure he just likes to make the mess with them because I always tell him not to do it. If you ever need to find him, just follow the trail of mess he leaves.

While M and V were watching the movie this morning, I watched a Facebook Live that Monica from Run Eat Repeat was doing and she brought up something interesting in part of her video. She talked about how when you first start something, you're never REALLY good at it. And I thought that would be something I'd like to touch on a little bit today.

When I started running I was ok. I wasn't really good. I got better through my first year of competitively running, but what I was really bad at was listening to my body. Because of that I never was really good at running at first. I was constantly injured and I didn't give myself enough of a recovery time to get any better at running. It wasn't until I'd taken a nice long break and started running because I needed it in my life (not because I wanted to compete) that I started getting better at it. The good part about my stubbornness was that I didn't give up. I kept working at it. I started doing better research on different workouts. I cross trained more. And I got better.

Now I'm running better than I ever have. I'm not the best, by far. I have a lot that I can work on. There's always room for improvement in things that are important to you. When you decide to continue actively pursuing something, that's when you start getting better at things.

My point is that even when you feel like you suck at something. The only way you're going to continue to suck at it is by quitting. There will be setbacks, and there will be times when you want to quit. That is part of the journey and part of progress. When you start to feel discouraged, or when someone tells you that you're not good at something, or when you feel like you're not making progress, the thing that matters is that you don't quit. Keep on trying. Eventually, you'll see some progress. It might be small progress, it might be slow progress. But progress is progress and that's what counts.